<p>Having a huge interest in early education, I really like this thread. Thanks BigG!</p>
<p>My incoherent thoughts on public education: I think whether it is a right or privilege depends on what exactly we think schools are supposed to be doing. BigG proposes to help society as a whole (or is he more concerned about individual students?) by removing the troublemakers, which seemed to me an interesting proposal. I wonder what we see as the overall mission of public schools: education? if so, to what level? to be able to work in munitions factories? serve in the armed forces? to compete internationally in science/math/research? to have some basic concept of world history? to have some logical reasoning ability? to understand something about media manipulation? to be able to vote “intelligently”? to provide every child the (at least theoretical) opportunity to achieve the American Dream? to keep gangs of young people out of the workforce so they don’t compete with older workers? to keep them off the street? Do we have a clearly articulated goal for public education? Is it to produce a certain kind of citizen? If we have an idea of what the schools are supposed to do, is there realistically a way for them to accomplish that goal? </p>
<p>It has always been interesting to me that, at least in my limited experience, families whose children have attended prestigious prep schools for generations never talk about “gifted” or “highly gifted”</p>